"i care"

A friend of mine suggested to me a few days ago that in fact, most people don’t care about poor people. “I’ve literally been sitting in meetings where someone will say, ‘I don’t have time for the poor!’” he insisted.

I argued. I felt I had to. I also felt he wasn’t quite right. But it wasn’t because of some burgeoning faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness. It was because I wanted to spin his comment differently.

“I think they care in the abstract,” I said. “Like, oh, wow, that’s really too bad that she’s living in a dumpster and he has no access to medicine. It really shouldn’t be that way! Let me put on a ribbon to show everyone else that I care, that I think it’s BAD! And then I can go back to sipping my cappuccino and planning my trip to Hawaii and feeling good about myself. Whew!”

He laughed with a sharp bitterness that is increasingly familiar to me.

“It’s like looking at a puppy,” I continued. “You go, awwwww, isn’t that adorable, I really FEEL something warm and fuzzy here…for about ten seconds…then I go on with my life. Don’t KICK the dog. Just give it a pat. And then walk away.”

I wasn’t being terribly articulate, I admit. But I was trying to get at something I’ve been trying to, well, get at for a long time. It’s the gap between what we know and how we act. Maybe it’s more a matter of what we are willing to know, and the extent to which we are willing to align our behavior with that knowledge. I’m not sure. But I do know it’s easy not to pay attention – to poverty, to HIV, to developing world debt, to the war, whatever. And it’s easy because it doesn’t really affect the lives of most people in the West. Not really. I know that when I go back to the States, I have a good job. I can go to the grocery store and buy onions any time I feel like it (Botswana decided to ban onion importation because we should be able to grow our own…but instead, we have no onions). I can call my parents, go on vacation, sleep on flannel sheets in the winter and crisp cotton in the summer with no malarial mosquitoes lurking in the curtain folds. And I can make my own cappuccino.

Now before I piss anyone off, let me say as well that I clearly am as guilty of not being affected as anyone else. I can’t figure out how to align my actions more closely with what’s going on in my head (ok, maybe that would be a disaster anyway). I’m swimming in a soupy sort of cognitive dissonance these days – somewhere between how I am, and the way I think I should be. I suppose that’s not so unusual, given that I work in a building where they lock the bathroom door when there’s no toilet paper and live in a house that has fleas (maybe – we’re still not sure).

I imagine that we all want our lives to ‘add up’ somehow – to amount to something, to have weight and shape and a pleasant taste when we take time to savor them. Here, I have a Zimbabwean sister – but I also have white friends who have lived in Africa for 15 years and can’t count a single black friend. I just spent three weeks in Europe, where among other things I bought a cobalt vase of Venetian glass and ate risotto with black truffles. But next week, I could go down with malaria and, well, possibly die. Last week I participated in a conservation workshop where one moment, I was being called “Dr. DeMotts” with a shovelful of thick disdain smeared on my title, and in the next I was asked to give a presentation to people who’ve been working the region for twenty years. Back, and forth, and back again. It’s just increasingly difficult to have my feet on the ground when I’m not sure whose ground it is, or what I’m doing on it. I asked my boss how he manages all the bouncing around between continents and cultures, and he said, “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”

But that didn’t really answer my question.